The Pink Robe Chronicles
Womanist Wisdom for Healing, Liberation, and Love
- Women
- Publisher: Broadleaf Books (Augsburg Fortress)
- Published: 2026
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Publisher's Description
For Black women who've grown weary of shrinking back. The Pink Robe Chronicles began in a moment of heartbreak. In August 2016, Rev. Dr. Melva L. Sampson wrapped herself in a tattered pink robe, pressed "Go live" on Facebook, and preached from her living room--grieving the police killing of Korryn Gaines and the silencing of her own voice in the pulpit. That livestream became a sanctuary. Week after week, she showed up in her robe, offering meditations on justice, healing, and spiritual insurgency. What started as a digital hush harbor grew into a movement. Now, in this powerful new collection of womanist wisdom, Dr. Sampson weaves together sermons, essays, letters, and reflections that center the lived experiences of Black women navigating identity, trauma, joy, and liberation. With fierce honesty and poetic depth, she chronicles her journey from silence to sovereignty, bringing ancestral wisdom, theological insight, and radical love into a sacred space for the weary and the rising. Each chapter closes with prompts, meditations, and affirmations that invite us into reflection, healing, and embodied truth-telling. The Pink Robe Chronicles offers a space to rest, rage, and reimagine. It is a love letter to Black women's brilliance, a call to collective healing, and a reminder that our stories are sacred--and our voices, unchained.
Endorsements (8)
“In a time when I have become increasingly disillusioned with the pastors of this world, Sampson remains one of the few spiritual guides I trust. Poetic and clear, she invites us into the journey of her own reclamation of voice, body, and mind. This book will expand your imagination for the divine and train you to encounter again your own face. From the moment I opened it, I understood with an urgency: These pages are sacred ground.”
“The Pink Robe Chronicles is a womanist archive of truth-telling, memory, and spiritual insurgency. This work adds vital language to our canon of dreaming as a Black, womanist technology of resistance. Dr. Melva Sampson's 'Afrofuturist Altar Calls' are grounded in lived theology, ancestral intelligence, and ethical imagination. She can summon liberated futures because she has faithfully chronicled the work required to build them. A sacred offering of witness, sanctuary, and becoming whole in public.”
“Some books find their way into our lives, and it is clear that the ancestors and the generations yet to come conspired to get them to us. They knew that those pages contained whatever we needed in order to be whole and well for the journey ahead. The Pink Robe Chronicles is one such book, and I stand in awe of the healing that will come as a result of it being in this world.”
“When Melva Sampson showed up online in her pink robe, you got her--unfiltered, unbossed, defiant, vulnerable, righteously angry, and healing--in real time. These live digital reflections formed a community because in speaking for herself, she voiced what so many others felt. Reading The Pink Robe Chronicles immerses you in the middle of Melva Sampson's stories without feeling like you missed anything. You'll read it in one sitting because you'll need the next insight now, but you'll keep pulling the book off your shelf for the poems, meditations, and reflections. Full of honesty and heart, The Pink Robe Chronicles is poised to be a new womanist classic.”
“This sacred dialectic narrative examines questions of revolutionary Black girlhood and womanist formation in a world that seeks to silence, surveil, erase, and shame Black girls and women. Merging womanist analysis with storytelling, Sampson speaks us into wholeness by insisting on bodily autonomy, spiritual agency, radical truth, remembering, sacred audacity, and righteous rage. The Pink Robe Chronicles is a necessary political technology of defiance and sacred reckoning that will move readers from scarcity to audacious possibility.”
“The Pink Robe Chronicles is a beautiful expression of womanist theology for the twenty-first century. With vision, passion, and deep love, Melva Sampson weaves together wisdom born of struggle, faith forged in community, and a prophetic commitment to healing and liberation. The Pink Robe Chronicles is theology at its best--a sanctuary to imagine a new world and cultivate a new humanity shaped by justice, renewed by tenderness, and open to the transformative power of ancestral faith.”
“With courage and intimate beauty, Dr. Sampson shares her story and weaves it into ever-widening circles of communal truth-telling. Her prophetic voice invites us not only to listen, but to imagine ourselves speaking, chronicling, and embodying liberation alongside her.”
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